Hosting - Scalable & Robust

Reliability

Budget shared hosting packages could result in you sharing facilities with a neighboring resource hogging site owner. Up-time is essential and while a site may not actually crash it may be adversely effected by the neighboring site sharing a common server.

In addition depending on the type of content and emailing processes employed, a neighboring site owner is hosting could cause a server to become Black Listed, which can be very difficult to defend and rectify on shared hosting and IP Address. There have been instances of law enforcement agencies instructed a Hosting provider to disable an entire server. That server hosted multiple independent customer sites. During the ensuring investigation and prosecution phase the innocent site owners were locked out of their site facilities and email was locked. Innocent neighboring site owners were not able to get loose of the enforced disabling.

That was a dramatic case, however the reality is that shared hosting can have unspecified issues such as memory, bandwidth or CPU congestion on the server. When that happens a site may appear to be down and result in site not found problems. That can also adversely effect Search Engine listings.

Expandability

This is vital because as your online business grows you wont want to rebuild or relocate your site. Online business websites have associated database activity, how that is managed in the server can dramatically slow down the site visitor experience or could result in page load errors. A quality server hosting system will provide the options to expand the server as required without interruption to your service and allow you to avoid costly remedial action.

Platform Type

In summary there are 2 primary platform types; Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS). Commonly used examples of Open Source services are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. No specific entity supports those systems, which means there is no specific company who created those systems to contact.

SaaS basically comprises 2 types; custom built systems created by small company programers and enterprise grade services created by companies like InfusionSoft and Adobe.

Custom built systems have the disadvantage of when the programer who created them is not available there is no reasonable economic way to have the system updated, patched or even repaired.

Systems such as Adobe provide enterprise grade development and maintenance to the platforms as part of the provider system.

Server Updates

All system require upgrades, updates and patching from time to time to ensure compatibility with the core operating environment and ensure security of the system.

Open Source systems updates are normally the responsibility of the website owner and can be at times just a click of an Upgrade button to major coding and file replacement.

SaaS services such as Adobe normally are provided with ongoing upgrades, updates and patching including security vulnerabilities.

Other SaaS services and some Open Source have to be updated by the programers who created it, it is important to understand who is responsible, when and if they charge fees to maintain and action updates.

Inclusions and Options

Server inclusions should normally include server space for site files and email.